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Summary: For The Relief of Urges, Better This Book, Than a Prostitute
Review: What can one add to the reviews above and below. Very little. The stories are fantastic, and we are witnessing the debut of a great story teller and crafter of words. Fate can be fickle, and Jewish fate can be even more so. How do you return to a routine after a bombing? How do overcome the dissonance of being an Orthodox pious Jew and working as a department store Santa Claus? What if you have your greatest creative epiphany in the moments prior to execution? I guess you just get on with it, read this book, and laugh. What else can one do?
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Summary: a must read
Review: A book that tosses you from laughter to deep contemplation within the span of pages. I find myself repeating lines in my head and I must admit often out loud to friends. The stories are so remarkably quotable that when you repeat snippets to friends you feel so proud of yourself for charming others with your recitation.
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Summary: Delicious writing
Review: It becomes apparent very quickly that you are in the presence of a writer who will be BIG. Every sentence is carefully crafted, full and very accessible. His stories just flow. I was left looking eagerly forward to this writer's next work.
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Summary: Remarkable collection
Review: Wonderful book. Best collection of short stories I've read in decades-poignant, witty, evocative and contains some of the most beautiful prose ever written. Kudos.
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Summary: Excellent, irreverent and touching look at Jewish Life
Review: Loved it and have recommended all of my friends to make Englander their new hero. He is Phillip Roth without the angst, Elie Wiesel without the grief, Alan Dershowitz without the whining, Shalom Aleichem without the earlocks, and God without the "Holier than thou" attitude.
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Summary: From THE MIAMI HERALD
Review: From THE MIAMI HERALD Reviewed by Susan MironTwenty-nineyear old Nathan Englander's catchily titled "For the Relief ofUnbearable Urges" is one of the classiest, most assured, impressive literary debuts I've come across in ten years of reviewing books. Delving into the world of Orthodoxy in many of these stories, Englander, now living as an admittedly secular Jew in Jerusalem, recalled in an interview that "religion got a lot more religious" while he was growing up in an Orthodox Jewish community on Long island. The often-hilarious story, "The Gilgul of Park Avenue," features a sudden religious metamorphosis in a New York taxicab. "The Jewish day begins in the calm of evening," it opens, "when it won't shock the system with its arrival. It was then, three stars visible in the Manhattan sky and a new day fallen, that Charles Morton Luger understood he was the bearer of a Jewish soul." The abrupt, manic spiritual transformation of this Protestant Park Avenue financial analyst, a "levelheaded man, not often victim to extremes of mood" into a excited soul yelling to the cabdriver, "Jewish, here in the back!" leads to study sessions with a Brooklyn rebbe, his psychiatrist deeming him mad, and an increasingly baffled, annoyed wife... Englander revels in extreme situations and characters saddled - or blessed - with extreme emotions, frustrations, and faith... Englander will inevitably be compared with the last generation of Jewish-American heavies, particularly Philip Roth. One critic recently likened him to Isaac Bashevis Singer on crack. But the many voices (including Orthodox women's in "The Wig" and "The Last One Way") he has given life to in this collection earn this gifted writer a distinct and distinguished niche of his own.
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Summary: A superb work by a promising new Jewish voice.
Review: In "The Trial", Franz Kafka places his protagonist Joseph K. in an authoratative world full of absurdities and secret courts that extend their rule from the sweltering heat of stuffy garrets. A single, independant man, K. feels reduced to the size of a number when he considers the power of the secret courts he is up against which have placed him under arrest. Kafka may have been depicting the isolation of conformity that modern life imposes, but when one considers that he was a Jewish writer living in Prague writing a few years before the outbrake of WWII, Kafka can be seen as a profit of the dehumanizing conditions that would insue from the Hollocaust, when Jews were alloted as much worth as numbers on a page. This especially seems likely when taking into account the ending of "The Trial" in which K. is ultimately executed by police of the secret court.
Many years later Nathan Englander comes along and depicts Jews not as numbers caught up in the gears of an inscrutable system, but as characters with unique and human qualities. The nine stories in Englander's first book, "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges" are written in poetry-like prose, where every sentence seems to be well thought out and painted in smooth brush strokes. These are stories that look back into the past (e.g. the Hollocaust) and that also explore the complexities of modern Jewish life today. In the nine stories Englander takes us from Communist Russia where subversive Jewish writers await execution to modern day Israel where a bomb rips through a busy commercial district while the witnesses are left to deal with the psychological aftermath. Many aspects of the Jewish experience are touched upon in "Urges" including stories which include Hasidic Jews. Inclined as they are to living their lives according to a strict set of rules and rituals, one would think Hasidic Judiasm to be a difficult subject matter to broach. However, Englander adroitly personifies the multifaceted layers of Hasidic life and the Hasidic individual. He breathes life into his Hasidic characters and they start to seem as real and internally conflicted as though they were made of flesh and blood instead of just words and sentences. Most memorable is Dov Binyamin, an Isrealite who, acting on the advice of his rabbi, sleeps with a prostitute in order to save his marriage. It is quirks like this that make "Urges" fun, as well as funny, to read. The characters may sometimes be dark, but they're not scary. In one story a woman attempts to have her husband killed so she can be formally divorced, but the story is so underscored with an undercurrent of humor that it ends up envoking more laughter than gasps. It is this clever balance of levity mixed with somber subject matter that makes Englander score as a story-teller. He knows how to tell a good story but is detached enough in telling it so as not to sound melodramatic. Nathan Englander's "Urges" deserves a space on every well read person's bookshelf. Personally, on mine, it sits between Kafka's "The Trial" and "The Diary of Anne Frank." A superb work by a promising new Jewish voice.
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Summary: An average collection of short stories
Review: Nathan Englander is a creative, intelligent writer whose stories range from profound to unfortunately predictable. There are a variety of short stories in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, all dealing with the common thread of the Jewish religion. The most interesting in my opinion is "The Twenty-Seventh Man," which includes some very raw emotions from its central characters. Although the conclusion is fairly predictable, the conversations between the four Jewish writers during Stalin's reign in the USSR. are quite powerful and significant. "The Wig" is less predictable, but lacks some of the zest of the prior story, but certainly makes up for it in craziness. Based upon the common idea that you don't really appreciate what you have until it is gone, the story follows around a woman in search of the perfect hair that she once had. This story opens up many people's eyes to what it would be like to live the life of the main character, Ruchama. While I never thought that I didn't understand her, I never really felt that I knew what made her tick either. The characters in "The Gilgul of Park Avenue"are far more developed, yet seemed to be less relatable. I just find it a story that is hard to believe and therefore couldn't understand the main character, Charles. His sudden epiphany in a NYC taxicab is quite difficult to relate to especially as a New Yorker. The story than becomes more believable, but Charles becomes more and more distracting. The title story was by far the most appealing and at the same time the most absurd. "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges" centers around a couple who are having marital problems and then leads to the husband making some very bad choices. I was intrigued by the husband's lack of common sense as well as the Rabbi's incredibly insensitive and unintelligent advice. Although some of the stories stand out in a bright shining light, many are dull and not worth reading.
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Summary: Great short story collection
Review: Nathan Englander's For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is a collection of short stories taking ordinary experiences everyday people have and portraying them in an interesting and creative manner. While some stories were a little confusing, introducing religious terminology I am unfamiliar with, they all served to teach me things I never knew about the Jewish religion. Each story presents its readers with an engaging situation in which the readers are eager to find out what happens next. One of the stories I would most recommend is "The Gilgul of Park Avenue." This story is about a Christian man who realizes in the back of a taxi that he is now Jewish, whether his wife likes it or not. This story was so interesting because I was able to put myself in the wife's position. I was able to imagine what I would do in her situation.
I found the stories both interesting and educational; introducing me to things I had never been aware of. The only thing I did not like about these stories were the cliffhanger endings. Englander ties up most loose ends before ending the story, but after reading them I began to wonder "what happens next?" All in all, a great collection of short stories that I would highly recommend.
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Summary: Revenge for an unhappy childhood?
Review: Englander was raised in a strictly Orthodox Jewish, insular community. Almost all of the stories present an exaggerated version of the dark hypocrisy and closed-mindedness such communities. Englander today is a secular Jew who seems to feel lucky that he escaped his childhood prison. His characters are uniformly pathetic and foolish and Englander imagines that all of them would be happier if they would just cast off their archaic lifestyle, grow their hair long and stop obeying their ignorant rabbis. The stories would have been more believeable if there was at least one sympathetic character, but I waited in vain for one to emerge. Englander has been compared to great Jewish writers of the past. Rather he seems like Tolstoy with his eye for hypocrisy but lacking Tolstoy's insight in what really makes people tick. The only story I liked was the final story. It's the only one that that does not involve Orthodox characters and it is the only one with true emotional force as it not a mean-spirited fantasy but a protrayal of truely human responses to actual events. I encourage Englander to leave his unhappy past behind and write more abnout the struggles of the secular world in which he now lives.
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